What does it mean that you are made in the image of God?
Donald J MacLean
“What am I?” Second only to the question “What is God?”, it is the greatest question we can ask. Only with that question answered, can we know and understand our place and purpose in the world.
And the Bible recognises the centrality of this question. Right in the first chapter of Genesis, God tells us who we are. He says of humanity, in distinction to all the rest of creation: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen.1:26-27).
Two very different questions – but one vital answer to both
Donald J MacLean
Why is the world not destroyed by cataclysmic natural disasters? Why is God’s purpose of salvation for His people secure? Two very different questions, with one answer.
And that answer was once one of the hallmarks of historic Reformed and Evangelical thought – the idea of covenant. Professor John Murray (1898–1975), of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, wrote: ‘Covenant theology is … a distinguishing feature of the Reformed Tradition … the idea of covenant came to be an organising principle in terms of which the relations of men to God were construed.’ The theology that came from the Reformation was emphatically a covenant theology.
